[maemo-developers] Maemo localization to officially non-supported languages

[From: Mohammed Hassan]

On Fri, 2007-10-26 at 09:45 +0200, ext Tollef Fog Heen wrote:
> * Mohammed Hassan 
> 
> (Please follow mail-followup-to, I read the list)
> 
> | > If the main problem is identifying untranslated strings in the UI, you
> | > could have a bogus locale where you translate all the translatable
> | > strings into their logical IDs.  (Which could be added as comments in
> | > the .c file or whatever.) and use that locale as fallback by setting
> | > LANGUAGE.
> | 
> | No it doesn't help. You will see an English sentence. How can you tell
> | if it's translated or not ?
> 
> No, you won't.
> 
> As an example, you are translating the fish applet from old
> gnome-utils into nb_NO.UTF8.  The msgid is «I am a goldfish».  The
> nb_NO.UTF8 msgstr will be «Jeg er en gullfisk».  The nokia_LOGICAL
> msgstr is «gnome-utils_ui_123».  LANGUAGE is set to
> nb_NO.UTF8:nokia_LOGICAL
> 
> Now, if an nb_NO.UTF8 translation exists, it will be used and you'll
> se the Norwegian translation.  If it doesn't exist, but the
> nokia_LOGICAL one does, that one will be used.  If neither exists, it
> will fall back to the msgid.

Which still doesn't help.
Currently if the string is not translated then we mark it in the PO
files so we and the developers can tell that it's not yet translated

In case a developer is using an incorrect logical ID or a logical it not
in the specs, we can still tell that something is wrong.

Now if we start using engineering English, we won;;t be able to tell if
it's been translated or not or is the developer using the correct
logical ID or not.

Even if we use the pseudo locale, you still can't easily tell.

> (Another workaround you could trivially do is to log each time gettext
> has to fall back to the msgid.)
That's a nice idea.

-- 
Localization Engineer
OSSO - Nokia Multimedia